Is this supposed to be surprising...? Regardless of whether it works for tenants, obviously rent control isn't there for the landlord's benefit.
It sounds like blaming the game rather than striking out against those who abuse it.
Perhaps another example: the drug war. Making marihuana illegal creates criminal activity other than just selling it. You could say "okay, so just police that", but that's not so easy in the real world, and we've seen the negative consequences of attempting it.
A lot of problems would be solved if politicians thought less about the intentions of their policies and more about the incentives those policies create. Too many policies make bad behavior rational. Even worse is that once you do that it's not just that good people start behaving badly, but also that bad actors out compete the good ones. A good policy aligns self interest with the common interest.
For example, how does, "rent-control => neglect the state of housing" That happens already without rent-control.
1) It incentivizes the landlord to shorten the amount of time a particular tenant will inhabit the property, because it is only when a tenant leaves and a new one comes in that the landlord is free to jack up the rent to market rates.
2) It compels the landlord to lower his expenses in order to ensure that his investment stays profitable. Ordinarily, a landlord is constrained by a desire to keep a property that will attract and retain good tenants, but since that is no longer (as much of) a factor, he will avoid making repairs and enhancements except in emergency situations where the law requires him to.
Source: landlord (albeit one who has never worked in an area with rent control policies)
The good landlords aren't pulling out every technically not illegal trick to make more money because they value things more than just being in the clear legally, but they do value being in the clear legally. The slimy landlords don't care about other effects, as long as they are legally in the clear. If you increase punishment/enforcement of the laws, you will hit both the good and the slimy landlords harder, with the slimy ones still taking a lead because they don't care about factors like a good reputation or having a clean conscious (yes, I'm somewhat stereotyping the good and slimy groups).
That the slimy ones know and practice working around the law may even mean that the good landlords get hit harder from a crackdown. In some way the government can't focus on the slimy landlords because by their very being they avoid government focus more than the good landlords.
The reason was that almost half of the apt. in the building were rent controlled (grandfathered in).
I think a mix of limited rent control (i.e. 5 years, max) plus building more apt for people that can't afford it, is a better combo on keeping a stability and folks being able to afford and live closer to work.
The only way to build more affordable apartments, is to allow for building more market rate apartments as well. Right now this current older (baby boomer) generation is screwing hard the upcoming one.
Because slumlords are better able to extract profits from rent controlled properties, they are willing to buy them for more than they are worth to bleeding hearts. All rent controlled properties will be managed by slumlords in the long run.
I am sure most people here who claim that the likes of Google and Apple should not 'avoid' taxes take every possible tax deduction in their personal lives so as to minimize their tax liability.
There's a reason the young are such idealists. It's easy to preach in the abstract about how OTHER parents should raise THEIR kids. Or how OTHER landlords should manage THEIR property investments. When these people become parents and homeowners themselves is when the rubber hits the road, and most just regress to the mean.
I'm a tenant in Los Angeles, and a staunch supporter of rent control. Knowing that my rent (which is already high) can only go up so much year-over-year provides some bit of stability as the tech industry devours eastward from Santa Monica.
They don't ignore it, they're just not ignorant about the costs of income and social stability.
For example: I grew up in a relatively modest house (3BR, 1,100 square feet) about 40 minutes outside of D.C. Growing up, there were quite a few young families in our neighborhood. Average household income was probably about $70k/year in today's money--relatively well off but not even what you'd call "upper middle class." Today, you'd need about $130k/year to afford to live in the same house. You're talking about a completely different class of people at those two income levels. It's two people with average jobs (maybe even without a four-year degree), versus two people with mid-level white-collar jobs (GS-11, since this is D.C.). It's people who had kids in their 20s versus people who put off having kids for 5-10 years to focus on their careers.
Today, the people I know starting families in the area are professionals making multiples of what my parents and our neighbors made at a similar stage in their lives. Instead of playing the housing bubble game, my wife and I commute in 60+ minutes each way. Partly because it enables us to raise our kids in a neighborhood with young families. But also just out of spite.
All this "stability" is a huge drag on young people that proponents of things like rent control ignore. That grandma living in her rent-controlled apartment is displacing some family that now has to live out further and end up seeing the kids they put off having for fewer hours each day.
Plus, income distributes follow a pareto distribution: in DC a 60th percentile family earns between ~35% more money than an 50th percentile family does, and a 70th percentile family earns ~35% more than a 60th family does, etc.
Those two factors are behind the explosion in housing prices around the nation. The same number of people can afford to pay substantially more for housing than they could previously. When you were growing up, your parents were competing with median income families for housing. But today, you're competing with ~70th percentile families for the same housing (per your income assessment).
The solution is to tear down low-density suburbs and replace them with high density residencies. But there's no incentive to do this because people are more than willing to just spend more time commuting so they can have a yard to mow on the weekends.
It’s hard to tell what people actually want. The lots in my neighborhood, laid out in the 1930s, has a standard plot size of 1/15 of an acre. This is a suburb of detached single family homes. A few people have doubled up the lots, but for the most part people just deal with having no yard. Today, the minimum lot size is five times bigger, 1/3 of an acre! So is there no incentive to build denser because people are willing to commute more to have the space, or because it’s illegal to do anything other than build ultra low density housing?
Who exactly is being spited here when you waste 10% of your life sitting in a car 'commuting' ?
This is literally an entire field of focus of economists and one of the fastest growing ones in the field. Have you considered that maybe you are the one that is ignoring the second-order effects of being a proponent of rent control and how it helps a specific person over a population?
Fundamentally modern economics despises the use of any other type of social control and signaling other then capital. Solution's to all problems must be in the context of markets.
One can see the effect that has had on middle and lower income families. And on our political systems. Where families are starved of resources and politicians are fearful of exercising independent political power on behalf of the voters.
That's the system that economists insisted was going to work much better than the system we had before.
Address the issue with more supply.
(At a livable standard of living, including proper sound isolation and fresh air, and even a space for vehicle storage* because people need to leave the city some time... *: Having an in city goods and services transport layer in weather controlled environments that leads to peripheral IO structures such as mega parking garages is fine.)
I realize what you are trying to say (I think), but your phrasing is curious.
Shortages are almost always caused by government intervention in a market by increasing the burden for suppliers and/or capping prices. There is no need to mandate anything, but instead just let developers do what they already want to do, build. It is the prohibitions (zoning regulations) on development that are the problem, not disinterest by developers.
In order to have an actual //correction// in current trends directed building must be several times beyond a normal build rate to make up for the decades of under-performance.
Forces them? As if they wouldn't raise rents as much as they felt they could get away with anyway.
Or as if without rent control landlords would keep rents low, merely out of the goodness of their hearts.
I agree to rent this place for a year.
I agree to rent this place for a year, and I'm paying for the option to re-rent it at the same rate for the next 5 years.
You can imagine that in commercial real estate one of these contracts is more expensive per month than the other. Especially in markets with rising rents.
Basically rent control bans the first type of contract, and requires the second. And therefore increases rental rates.
When you institute rent control, you save existing teachers some money, but when they retire, good luck finding new teachers willing to work in the new market with much higher rents.
If I have rent control, I will list at a higher price and let the property sit vacant for longer to find a tenant because the law says that I am limited in the ability to later adapt the rent to the market.
Without rent control, there is much less incentive to leave a property vacant, looking for a tenant willing to pay a higher price point.
Most microeconomics courses teach that markets don't have one price for a good, and one of the lessons will be in strategies, such as coupons, that owners of goods use to sell into the market at multiple prices. There isn't a single number that a landlord can rent a unit out for in a given market.
I've know plenty of people who winced at the rent they paid, but told themselves that in 5 years it'll be worth it as the rent will be below market.
That makes it the market rate for the apt though. You'd be above market rate if it didn't get rented out in a normal timeframe.
[1] https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/03/29/2157698/ranking-ameri...
If not for rent control, he would charge $3000/month now at market-clearing rates, get a tenant in there in 30 days, and increase rent by the standard market price every 12 months. But due to rent control undercutting profits, he can't do this, so he keeps it open at a higher price.
http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty....
That's not what he would do. Tenants tend to value a property more as time goes on. Beyond increasing market rates.
Without rent control, your rent will increase faster than the average market increase would indicate unless you move very often. Rent control may not be the optimal way to combat this, but it is something many societies recognize as a problem.
Depends on the scheme in place. There are a lot of places where the amount the landlord can raise the rent between tenants is capped.
There are two big problems with rent control: It results in a constriction of supply over time, and it causes degradation in housing stock quality. There's no reason to put one cent more into your rent controlled place than required by law.
Ah yes, the landlords are forced to massively raise rents, unlike the tenants, who are allowed to choose whatever price they want.
Simple reliance on a profit model for housing is never going to adequately meet housing needs.
Can you give something to justify that statement, something more than just a bare assertion? To me, it looks like reliance on something other than the profit motive (that is, rent control) is what's causing the problems here.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/a-timeline-of-cia-atrocities/5...
Referring to them as talking points without refuting them sounds a whole lot like trying to dismiss the argument without dealing with the contents. Don't get upset and fall back on procedural obfuscation if you're trying to have a conversation with me.
The non-communist countries tried to sabotage the communist ones, true. (And vice versa - a cold war is like that.) That is not at all the same as saying that, within a capitalist countries, the capitalists will not permit you to set up a commune. Your argument (and link) therefore do not actually address jules' point at all.
> In addition, a commune within a capitalist society would still be reliant on the labor of an external, exploited proletarian class.
How does that address jules' point (or even mine)?
> Communism is internationalist. Ultimately this is the failure of first world social democratic programs that provide decent gains for their working classes but do so at the expense of oppressed peoples in the global south.
How does that address jules' point (or even mine)? Starting a commune in the US doesn't exploit the oppressed in the global south whatsoever.
This is why I say it looks like you're just looking to spew talking points. You're saying a lot, but it's not relevant to the subject.
2 & 3. What I'm trying to help you understand is that a commune within a capitalist state that doesn't challenge the structures of capitalist society is not a communist project.
Please calm down, it's clear you're getting upset. I'm trying to help you understand.
Basically, if the real market price of an apartment is ~$3,000/mo, but in 5 years it realistically would be $5,000, they will simply list it for $5,000 now, to mitigate the loss.
My mother-in-law is a land lord in Los Angeles (a very fair one at that), and is also about as bleeding heart liberal as you can get. She is a staunch opponent of rent control.